Then they begin to go, “Well it still seems like the point of my practice is to get my fruition and get my hit, sort of reset my mind, but walking around I’m not really seeing what I think I should be able to see,” and that gets more and more frustrating. So people being to incline their minds towards what I’ll call a less cycle-fixated approach and a more right-here-right-now, an it’s got to be now or never kind of dharma-awakening approach, and they begin to see more and more of what I’ll call emptiness in real time. Whereas they go deeper into more cycles and stages and more really investigating how things are, just moment to moment, same good, old foundation technique stuff, they begin to notice, “Wait a second. The center point really doesn’t seem to be such a big deal anymore. The sense of subject seems to be becoming more integrated with the field, or it seems to become less important,” or they seem to see I’m seeing more of what I’ll call “luminosity of phenomenon”: that they’re just showing themselves over there. Because that’s showing itself over there, maybe this is just showing itself over here, and they begin to make those connections in terms of their experience and begin to notice as an obvious living, direct, non-theoretical but just sort of baseline sense processing experience. “Wow, this field really seems to be more and more integrated. There seems to be more and more just a sense of this is just what’s happening and it’s all wide open and it’s all just part of the field of attention and the sense of subject and center point and watcher or me, whatever you want to call it, at that level is not such a split off thing.” So you can get to anagami stages. They tend to be a lot like that, and as you get towards the high end of the anagami territory, you start to notice, “this seems to be really pretty complete and kind of done.”

I remember when I was a late anagami, I don’t know how many stages I went through thinking I was an Arhat and was so wrong. I would walk around for a few weeks and everything seems centerless and luminous and like it was happening on its own in some completely non-dual way, and then I’d cross another arising and passing way and hit a new dark night and realize I was completely delusional, but it was kind of nice while it seemed to last, and it sort of gave me hints of what would come next.

So one begins to have more integration, and one’s experience become more and more completely like that, and then finally one can get to a place where one simply understands it has to be now and it has to be all the time and there must be some truth that I’m missing, and one finally begins to see through the subtle anagami traps of wanting a super-space—that some transcendent space they can come into, or wanting this to be some super-watcher or wanting everything to be luminous in a wondrous “Oh it’s all luminous, wonderful kind of way.” As the golden chains of the high levels, or mid-high levels of realization start to fall away and they end up coming back down to earth, finally they abandon even those subtle things and subjects and wanting to be the subtle watcher that is simultaneously empty and luminous and wanting to be the subtle enlightened being that is the whatever… The transcendent super being or something. And as that all finally falls away and is seen through as being just preposterous and unrealistic, one understands, “Oh. This is it,” and when one finally comes all the way back down to earth, the split can dissolve. That usually takes good work and strong concentration and all the standard supports for insight and investigation and all that. But finally one knows, “Oh yeah. This is done.” And the sense of subject-object duality does not arise again once one is stabilizes in that. And the whole field is just happening and life is just going on, bodies just moving, thoughts are just coming, all aware or just manifesting where they are, and concepts like luminosity and awareness even seem extraneous. There’s just the sense-field, really at a basic, ordinary, human level. And yet there is something remarkable about that. But it’s way more down to earth than everybody thinks it’s going to be. That’s my basic outline of the stages of insight from that point of view.